since Data's head can be activated apart from his body, why

[WildManWizard]

didn't they just power it up when they found it in the San Francisco cave and ask what happened?

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

Because [INSERT TECHNOBABBLE] would've [INSERT TECHNOBABBLE] leading to [INSERT TECHNOBABBLE].

Or...

Plot.

 

[WildManWizard]

Because [INSERT TECHNOBABBLE] would've [INSERT TECHNOBABBLE] leading to [INSERT TECHNOBABBLE].

Or...

Plot.

yeah.....i guess thats why they didn't just beam the genesis device into space on wide dispersal, scattering the atoms, in the wrath of khan

 

[Timo]

It's easy to accept that beaming bombs is a piss-poor idea: what if they are triggered into blowing at the first millisecond already?

Not interrogating Data's head takes a bit of creative reading, though. Right off the bat, Data declares his head "decayed" and refers to the event as having "ended his life". So quite possibly the head is dead, plain and simple.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Takeru]

Not interrogating Data's head takes a bit of creative reading, though. Right off the bat, Data declares his head "decayed" and refers to the event as having "ended his life". So quite possibly the head is dead, plain and simple.

Except it's clearly not dead and works perfectly fine when they dust it off and put it on Data's body at the end of part 2.

 

[Timo]

Well, that's at the point in the story where they have to get Data a new head. No doubt "dusting off" was an intensive procedure that reversed the "decaying" part. But bringing the head back to life would not have been worth the hassle otherwise. Say:

We still don't know whether one could interrogate, say, Data's left hand. All his parts seem to send out positronic signals, or at least B-4's did. (Although that model might have been leaking more, due to being an early and poorly protected genuine Soong; a fake built to leak prominently so that it could be used as bait; or a genuine Soong modified by Shinzon to leak prominently for better baiting; the very fact that the positronic signal was there in every body part was taken for granted by the heroes). Sure, interrogating the part that has the voice-producing machinery might be easier, but the hand could always write, and a plug-in procedure might be better than listening to the head speak anyway.

Perhaps the head really was dead and contained nothing of Data, but Data's head got back up to speed from stuff stored in his intact, non-decayed body? All the head had to offer on its own AFAWK was the message tapped in by Picard.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Angry Fanboy]

There's a big difference between the head being disconnected from the working body temporarily and the head lying abandoned in a cave for a couple of hundred years.

A bit like how you can unplug your laptop and it'll function normally for a day or so but if you were to leave that laptop in a cave for a couple of hundred years you wouldn't be able to just switch it on.

 

[valkyrie013]

That and being Ripped off, and being taken off by a trained monkey. It probably blew a bunch of somethings.. and had to be replaced. where in 19th centery they didn't have the tech to repair his head.

 

[ThankQ]

if you were to leave that laptop in a cave for a couple of hundred years you wouldn't be able to just switch it on.

Man, if I had a dollar for...

 

[Tosk]

How do we know they didn't try? Later on when they try to bring Data online with his old head attached it doesn't work, so perhaps they abandoned the initial attempt to activate the head on its own.

 

[Arpy]

The head was blown off its body by a weird alien energy explosion. My head canon ... heh heh heh ... says it was damaged during decapitation.